Fort Henry

On February 6, 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed at Fort Henry in Stewart County, Tennessee, in an engagement of the American Civil War. This clash marked the first significant Union triumph in the Western Theater and gave Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant his earliest major success there.

Two days earlier, on February 4 and 5, Grant had put two divisions ashore just above the fort along the Tennessee River. These soldiers formed the core of what would later become the Army of the Tennessee, though that designation did not yet exist. Grant intended to move against the fort on February 6 while gunboats under Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote struck simultaneously from the water. Precise and powerful cannon fire from the ships, combined with relentless rain and the fort's unfortunate location, which left it nearly swallowed by swelling river waters, pushed its commander, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, to yield to Foote even before Grant's infantry reached the scene.

With Fort Henry's fall, the Tennessee River lay open to Union vessels moving upstream across West Tennessee, reaching as far as a point just south of the Alabama line. Between February 6 and February 12, Union forces sent ironclads on raids that wrecked Confederate vessels and railroad bridges along the waterway. Then, on February 12, Grant marched his army twelve miles overland, roughly nineteen kilometers, to confront Confederate forces at what became the Battle of Fort Donelson.

Background

Kentucky had proclaimed itself neutral in the war during early 1861, a stance that Confederate forces breached first. On September 3, Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow, following instructions from Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, took control of Columbus, Kentucky. The town sat atop bluffs rising 180 feet (55 m) above the Mississippi, giving Confederate forces a commanding position from which to block any Union push down the river. Columbus also marked the endpoint of the Memphis & Ohio railroad, a line connecting further south to the crucial Charleston & Memphis railroad. There, Confederate forces set up 140 heavy guns along with underwater mines and stretched a massive chain a full mile across the water to Belmont. Some 12,000 Confederate soldiers held the town, effectively sealing off commercial traffic heading south.

Two days after this move, Ulysses S. Grant, then a Union brigadier general, showed the boldness that would later define his military reputation by taking Paducah, Kentucky, an important rail and river junction near where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio. From that point forward, both sides abandoned any pretense of honoring Kentucky's neutral status, and whatever edge the Confederates had gained by moving first evaporated. Tennessee lost the protective buffer that a neutral Kentucky had once provided.

As 1862 began, command of Confederate forces across a vast stretch from Arkansas to the Cumberland Gap fell to a single officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, though his troops were stretched thin across too much territory. Polk held the left side of this line at Columbus with 12,000 men, while Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner anchored the right at Bowling Green, Kentucky, commanding 4,000 troops. The middle of the line rested on two river forts, Henry and Donelson, under Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, who also had roughly 4,000 soldiers. These forts represented the only real barriers protecting the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. Should Union forces gain free passage on these waterways, they would open two routes straight into Tennessee, both east and west, threatening the essential Memphis & Charleston Railroad among other targets.

Meanwhile, Union forces in the western theater lacked any centralized leadership structure, split instead among three distinct departments: Kansas under Maj. Gen. David Hunter, Missouri under Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, and Ohio under Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. This fractured arrangement showed its consequences by January 1862, as the commanders failed to settle on a shared plan for the Western Theater. Political pressure to secure pro-Union eastern Tennessee weighed on Buell, who advanced toward Nashville only gradually. Within Halleck's command, Grant pushed up the Tennessee River as a diversion meant to support Buell's planned advance, an advance that ultimately never materialized. President Lincoln pressed Halleck and other western commanders to launch a coordinated offensive by his birthday, February 22. Though known for a careful approach, Halleck ultimately warmed to Grant's idea of striking Fort Henry, partly hoping such a victory might strengthen his position against Buell, his professional rival. Adding urgency was word that Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard might soon reinforce the area with 15 regiments. On January 30, 1862, Halleck gave Grant the green light to move against Fort Henry.

Grant acted swiftly, departing from Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, on February 2. By February 4 and 5, his force had reached the Tennessee River, numbering between 15,000 and 17,000 soldiers organized into two divisions under Brig. Gens. John A. McClernand and Charles F. Smith. Naval support came from the Western Gunboat Flotilla under Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote, comprising four ironclads, the flagship Cincinnati along with the Carondelet, St. Louis, and Essex, directly under Foote, plus three timberclad vessels, the Conestoga, Tyler, and Lexington, led by Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps. Because the war was still young and transport vessels were scarce, moving all the troops required two separate trips upriver. Facing

Fort Henry

Perched on the Tennessee River's eastern shore near Kirkman's Old Landing, Fort Henry took the shape of a five-sided earthwork with open bastions, spreading across 10 acres. Its position placed it roughly a mile past Panther Creek and some six miles upstream from where the Big Sandy River and Standing Rock Creek meet the Tennessee.

The fort's origins trace back to May 1861, when Tennessee's governor Isham G. Harris commissioned Daniel S. Donelson, the state's attorney, as a brigadier general and tasked him with fortifying the region's waterways. Donelson initially scouted locations that proved workable but sat inside Kentucky, a state maintaining neutrality at the time. He then pushed upriver until he crossed into Tennessee territory, settling on a spot along the Cumberland River for what would become the fort carrying his own name. Bushrod Johnson, a colonel with the Tennessee Corps of Engineers, signed off on this choice.

While work commenced on Fort Donelson, Donelson traveled twelve miles west to the Tennessee River, where he picked out the ground for a second installation, this one honoring Tennessee's Senator Gustavus Adolphus Henry Sr. Since Fort Donelson occupied the Cumberland's western shore, he chose the Tennessee's eastern bank for the new fort, reasoning that a single garrison might shuttle between the two and hold both simultaneously. He also judged it improbable that both would face attack at once. But whereas Fort Donelson sat on favorable terrain, Fort Henry's location was low and marshy, overshadowed by hills on the opposite bank. This flaw meant the fort regularly flooded during storms or rising tides, and rainfall sometimes submerged over half the structure, swamping much of its armory in the process. Its one redeeming feature was a clear line of fire stretching two miles down the river. The surveying party Donelson assigned, civil engineer Adna Anderson and Major William F. Foster of the 1st Tennessee Infantry, raised strong objections to the location and brought their concerns to Colonel Johnson, who nonetheless gave his blessing for reasons that remain unclear.

Rather than being built to withstand infantry assaults of the kind later common in the war, the fort was meant simply to control river traffic. Ground was broken in mid-June, with labor supplied by troops of the 10th Tennessee Infantry alongside enslaved workers. On July 12, 1861, the fort's first cannon was fired as a test. Activity then slowed considerably for the rest of the year, since the Mississippi River forts took precedence for manpower and artillery allocations. General Polk compounded matters by focusing his attention on defending Columbus, Kentucky, rather than Forts Henry and Donelson. Reinforcements arrived in late December in the form of the 27th Alabama Infantry along with 500 enslaved laborers, who built a smaller fortification on Stewart's Hill across the river, close enough for artillery to reach Fort Henry; this outpost became known as Fort Heiman. By January 1862, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman had taken command over both forts, overseeing a combined force numbering 4,900. Fort Henry itself held somewhere between 3,000 and 3,400 troops, split into two brigades under Colonels Adolphus Heiman and Joseph Drake. Most of these men still carried flintlock rifles left over from the War of 1812.

By the time battle arrived, seventeen guns had been installed at the fort, eleven aimed at the river and six more 18-pounder smoothbores positioned against potential land assaults. Among the artillery were two heavier pieces, a 10-inch Columbiad and a 24-pounder rifled cannon, while the bulk consisted of 32-pounder smoothbores. Two 42-pounders were also present, though no shells of that size could be found. Under normal river conditions, the fort's walls stood 20 feet tall and measured 20 feet thick at their base, narrowing to nearly 10 feet at the parapet. Yet February 1862 brought heavy rainfall that swelled the river until most of the fort, including its powder magazine, lay underwater.

Confederate defenders also employed a tactic never before seen in warfare: torpedoes, what would now be called naval mines, were secured beneath the surface in the main channel and set to detonate on contact with passing vessels. High water and leaking metal casings ultimately rendered this defense useless.

Battle

Grant moved his men ashore at two separate points on February 4 and 5. McClernand's division took position three miles north of the fort along the eastern bank of the Tennessee River, meant to block any escape by the defenders, while C.F. Smith's division crossed to seize Fort Heiman on the Kentucky shore so its guns could be turned against Fort Henry. Progress toward the forts stalled when heavy rain fell on the night of February 5, and as a result the fighting became a matter for the gunboats, with the naval action finished before any infantry engaged.

Tilghman could see that the fort's fall was inevitable. With only nine guns still functional above the waterline, he chose to keep a portion of his artillery behind to slow the Union fleet while sending the bulk of his command overland toward Fort Donelson, twelve miles distant, under Col. Adolphus Heiman. Fort Heiman itself had already been given up on February 4. The following afternoon, gunfire from the Union gunboats struck the garrison at Fort Henry, killing one man and wounding three. By February 5, nearly everyone had withdrawn from the fort except a detachment of fifty four men from Company B, 1st Tennessee Artillery, CSA. Union cavalry chased the retreating Confederates, though muddy roads kept them from catching more than a handful. Tilghman, following his usual habit, passed the night aboard the steamer Dunbar, anchored a mile and a half upriver, where around midnight he wrote to Johnston describing the situation before heading back to the fort just ahead of daylight.

The next morning, February 6, Foote brought his seven gunboats into position near Fort Henry by about half past noon. They opened fire from roughly 1,700 yards away, starting an artillery duel that lasted more than an hour. Tilghman refused an early demand to surrender, so the bombardment went on. It marked the first time the newly built ironclads had seen combat. Foote arranged his four ironclads in a single line, with the three timberclads under Seth Ledyard Phelps trailing behind to provide long range but weaker supporting fire. Because the river ran high and Fort Henry's guns sat low, the Union vessels avoided major harm, and Confederate shots could only find the thickest parts of the ironclads' armor. Even so, each of the four Union ironclads absorbed repeated hits. The Essex suffered the worst damage when a thirty two pound shot pierced its hull and struck the central boiler, releasing scalding steam through much of the vessel. Thirty two sailors were killed or injured, among them commander William D. Porter, and the ship took no further part in the campaign.

Aftermath and the timberclad raid

The exchange of fire went on for seventy-five minutes before Tilghman gave up the fort to Foote's fleet, which had pressed to within 400 yards (370 m) to fire at close range. He had told his men beforehand that he intended to hold out for an hour so they would have extra time to get away. By the time he surrendered, only one gun remained operable, its ammunition nearly spent because the powder magazine had flooded, and every other piece had been wrecked or silenced. Tilghman had the Confederate colors taken down and a white sheet run up the flagpole in their place. The Union gunboats stopped firing as soon as they spotted it. Because the fort itself lay underwater, the party arranging the surrender had to leave through the sally port in a small boat and bring